Learn here how SAI Global has brought advanced backup and DR best practices into play for its users and customers. Examine too how this has not only provided business continuity assurance, but it has also provided beneficial data lifecycle management and virtualization efficiency improvement.

Mark Iveli, IT System Engineer at SAI Global, based in Sydney, Australia, details on how standardizing DR has helped improve many aspects of SAI Global’s business reliability. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

When Hurricane Ike struck Texas in 2008, it became the second costliest hurricane ever to make landfall in the U.S. It was also a wake-up call for Houston-based insurance wholesaler Myron Steves &amp; Co., which was not struck directly but nonetheless realized its IT disaster recovery (DR) approach was woefully inadequate.

Supporting some 3,000 independent insurance agencies in the Gulf Coast region, with many insured properties in that active hurricane zone, Myron Steves must have all it resources up and available, if and when severe storms strike.

Learn how Tim Moudry, Associate Director of IT, and William Chambers, IT Operations Manager, both at Myron Steves, made a bold choice to go essentially 100 percent server virtualized in 90 days. That then set the stage for a faster, cheaper, and more robust DR capability. It also helped them improve their desktop-virtualization delivery, another important aspect of maintaining constant availability no mater what.

With a server virtualization rate approaching 100 percent, Ducati has embraced virtualization rapidly in just the past few years, with resulting benefits of application flexibility and reduced capital costs. As a result, Ducati has also embraced private cloud models now across both its racing and street bike businesses.

To learn more about the technical and productivity benefits of virtualization and private clouds, we're joined by Daniel Bellini, the CIO at Ducati Motor Holding in Bologna, Italy. He's interviewd by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

In our wide-ranging discussion, we deliver actionable recommendations for how IT can support cloud benefits and re-architect their data centers with low risk, and how IT can quickly take on the role of cloud benefits enabler.